Schema.org sameAs

Where sameAs is used

• Organization — your own brand, with sameAs pointing to the Wikidata Q number, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Twitter.
• Person — author byline with sameAs pointing to Wikidata, LinkedIn, ORCID, Twitter — an important E-E-A-T lever.
• Product — your own products with sameAs pointing to the manufacturer entry and, where applicable, Wikipedia.
• Place — location linked to a Wikidata geo entity.
• DefinedTerm — glossary term with sameAs pointing to the Wikidata concept entity (e.g. SEO Q180711, AI Q11660).
• About / mentions in Article — topic entities with sameAs pointing to Wikidata.

A concrete example of the markup

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Rankmio",
  "url": "https://rankmio.de",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q...",
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/rankmio",
    "https://twitter.com/rankmio"
  ]
}

This tells Google: ”the website rankmio.de is the official website of the Wikidata entity Q… — the same brand as the LinkedIn entry and the Twitter account.”

The most common mistake: sameAs on the article instead of the entity

An article about search engine optimisation is not the same thing as the concept of search engine optimisation. Even so, the Wikidata address of the topic often ends up directly in the Article object. The markup then claims the article is that concept.

Correctly, sameAs sits one level down, on the Thing inside about or mentions:

{
  "@type": "Article",
  "about": [{
    "@type": "Thing",
    "@id": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q180711",
    "name": "Search engine optimisation",
    "sameAs": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization"]
  }]
}

On the Article itself, sameAs only belongs there when the same text also lives at a second address — a syndicated copy, for instance. Then the identity claim is true.

How to spot the mistake: the same entities appear twice in the object, once flat in sameAs and once as a Thing in about. When you see that, the flat list can go.

sameAs for glossary and guide content

For every glossary entry and every in-depth guide article: mark up the main entities in the Article schema as about with a sameAs link to Wikidata, and related terms as mentions. The effect: AI engines recognise the thematic depth not only from the full text, but from the explicit structured networking of entities. A domain whose content is fully linked via sameAs signals considerably more authority than one without — even if the backlink structure does not change.